2018-19 Solar Car Challenge Blog

The team is hard at work since returning to school after Winter Break. Here’s what we’re up to! Cutting, welding, and more! We have started to cut parts for the suspension and chassis. Students are learning how to use different tools in the shop such as the horizontal band saw, table saw, and hand saws. […]

Over the week-long break, we made several leaps in progress on our way to a working solar car. Since we have not competed in this competition before, it is paramount that we iterate our design as much as possible in order to artificially boost our team’s experience. Over the course of the winter break, several […]

Our new chassis design has taken a major shift in its compatibility with other parts and its aerodynamics. We have changed our chassis to be thinner to accommodate the change in the width of a human sitting down. At the bottom of the chassis, the inner width is 22 inches and its upper width is […]

It can hardly be argued that some of the most important parts of a car are the wheels, it wouldn’t be much of a car without them. However, in order to comply with the rules of the Solar Car Competition (and protect the rear of the poor soul who has to drive the car), we […]

The aerodynamics of our solar car are full steam ahead. A smooth body will ensure that the power from our motors is spent moving the car instead of opposing the drag. Essential elements of our aerodynamic body: Fairings around wheels Smooth airfoil shaped body surrounding chassis Aerodynamic solar panel frame and struts We connected with […]

We have been assembling photovoltaic cells into arrays and laminating them with a variety of techniques in order to understand the impact on cell efficiency. We are experimenting with 156 mm x 156 mm Sunpower cells and are covering them with heat activated lamination plastic. Recently, we found that the best way to ensure good […]

We decided to make our car for the Solar Car Challenge’s Advanced Division, so we are allowed to use other batteries, such as Lithium-Ion Batteries, in our car instead of deep-cycle Lead-Acid batteries. Though it does make the design more complicated, this different battery technology has many benefits for our car. Due to the Lithium-Ion […]

Our custom solar panels just arrived last week after much planning and preparation. The panels are semi-flexible and should be highly efficient, but their fragility means we can’t do much with them until we have a secure place to mount them for further testing. Consequently, we have begun to design the panel rack which will […]

As per the brake team’s last post, Starting to Stop, we are in the process of designing a brake pedal that will successfully actuate the calipers of the car, via steel brakes, once mounted to the suspension. In that post, we highlighted the pedal we would be mounting onto the levers by showing a screenshot of the […]

The team is hard at work since returning to school after Winter Break. Here’s what we’re up to! Cutting, welding, and more! We have started to cut parts for the suspension and chassis. Students are learning how to use different tools in the shop such as the horizontal band saw, table saw, and hand saws. […]

Brake Levers Since our initial post, we have acquired new brake levers that will likely be the final iteration of our cable design for the prototype car. The levers will be attached via steel brake cables to calipers mounted to the suspension. To pull the lever, we are manufacturing a unique pedal to place upon […]

The Solar Car Competition is a very ambitious and rigorous technical challenge with innumerable engineering hurdles to be overcome. This is especially for us, as we are a first-year team with little existing knowledge base to draw from. Therefore, it is invaluable to learn from the experiences of other high school teams who have come […]

Over the week-long break, we made several leaps in progress on our way to a working solar car. Since we have not competed in this competition before, it is paramount that we iterate our design as much as possible in order to artificially boost our team’s experience. Over the course of the winter break, several […]

Our new chassis design has taken a major shift in its compatibility with other parts and its aerodynamics. We have changed our chassis to be thinner to accommodate the change in the width of a human sitting down. At the bottom of the chassis, the inner width is 22 inches and its upper width is […]

Since joining RAHS, I have always been fascinated by the Solar Car Team. Since joining, I have had so much fun, I know I made the right decision. Instead of making models or basic design, we are making a real car that you could drive and and make yourself, this idea is so cool to […]

As with any street legal car, there needs to be light indicators so that drivers are able to see what that car’s driver is doing. So for our car, while headlights are not necessary, stop and turn lights are required by the rules, so that our unfortunate driver doesn’t end up getting rammed for not […]

For our solar car, there are many requirements that we need to meet, and the many more needs to reach optimal performance with our vehicle. We need to design a rear-view camera system, telemetry displays, and a system control panel. In order to accomplish this, we will be using an array of Raspberry Pi B+ […]